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Events for September 28, 2017

  • CS Colloquium Event: Facebook Tech Talk

    Thu, Sep 28, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Alex Helm, Catrina Manahan, Charles Kuykendoll, Yuandong Tian, Min Li, Qiachao Que, See Biography

    Talk Title: AI in Games: Achievements and Challenges

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.

    Recently, substantial progress of AI has been made in applications that require advanced pattern reading, including computer vision, speech recognition and natural language processing. However, it remains an open problem whether AI will make the same level of progress in tasks that require sophisticated reasoning, planning and decision making in complicated game environments similar to the real-world. In this talk, I present the state-of-the-art approaches to build such an AI, our recent contributions in terms of designing more effective algorithms and building extensive and fast general environments, as well as issues and challenges.

    Biography: Yuandong Tian is a Research Scientist in Facebook AI Research, working on reasoning with deep learning in games and theoretical analysis of deep non-convex models. He is the leader researcher and engineer for DarkForest (Facebook Computer Go project). Prior to that, he was a Software Engineer/Researcher in Google Self-Driving Car team during 2013-2014. He received Ph.D. in Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University on 2013, Bachelor and Master degree of Computer Science in Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is the recipient of 2013 ICCV Marr Prize Honorable Mentions for his work on global optimal solution to non-convex optimization in image alignment.

    Host: CS Department

    Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Ryan Rozan

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  • CAIS Seminar: Dr. Peng Shi (University of Southern California) - Prediction and Optimization in School Choice

    Thu, Sep 28, 2017 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Peng Shi, University of Southern California

    Talk Title: Prediction and Optimization in School Choice

    Abstract: In public school choice, students submit preference rankings for a given set of schools to the school board, which takes into account everyone's choices to compute the assignment. An important policy lever is what choice options to offer to each neighborhood, and how to prioritize between students. A key trade-off is between giving students equitable chances to go to the schools they want and controlling the city's school busing costs.

    We study the optimization problem of choosing the choice menus and priorities for each neighborhood in order to maximize the sum of utilitarian and max-min welfare, subject to capacity and transportation constraints. The optimization is built on top of a predictive model of how students will choose given new choice menus, which we validate using both out-of-sample testing and a field experiment. Under a large market approximation, the optimization reduces to an assortment planning problem in which the objective is social-welfare rather than revenue. We show how to efficiently solve this sub-problem under various discrete choice models, and use this to produce better menus and priorities for Boston, which we evaluate by discrete simulations.

    Biography: Dr. Peng Shi is an Assistant Professor of Data Science and Operations at the USC Marshall School of Business. He is interested in developing quantitative methodologies for the betterment of society. His current research focuses on optimization in matching markets, with applications in school choice, public housing, and online marketplaces. His research on school choice won multiple awards, including the ACM SIGecom Doctoral Dissertation Award, the INFORMS Public Sector Operations Best Paper Competition, and the INFORMS Doing Good with Good OR Student Paper Competition. Prior to joining USC, he completed a PhD in Operations Research at MIT, and was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research.

    Host: Milind Tambe

    Location: Seeley Wintersmith Mudd Memorial Hall (of Philosophy) (MHP) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Computer Science Department

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